ABSTRACT
Over the past decades, the unique and remarkable surface properties of carbon materials have been responsible for the market success of many new carbon-based products, including some with very high value added and indeed some for electrochemical applications. In the electrochemical fi eld, the opportunities for both vastly improved and novel products are very attractive, as evidenced by the information provided in the other chapters of this book. And it is not surprising that carbon electrochemistry research has reblossomed in the last decade, as illustrated by the ISI citation frequency of the works by Kinoshita [1] and Randin [2], summarized in Figure 5.1 (see also Figure 5.5). The latter is a more practically oriented review, and it is intriguing that it seems to have been “forgotten.” The former was the fi rst attempt to place carbon electrochemistry into the context of carbon’s physicochemical properties; it remains necessary though not suffi cient reading.
